Earlier in the week I recorded an interview with Dr Khin Neyin Chan from Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). She was in Canberra to present the organisation’s recent report, Lives in the balance: The urgent need for HIV and TB treatment in Myanmar. In this short interview we discuss the work undertaken by MSF inside the country, with special attention to HIV and Tuberculosis treatment programs. A podcast version of the interview should be available shortly.

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I was shocked when Thailand forced MSF to abandon its work here in country.

It seems incredably short sighted in that a health problem in Burma or Thaiand will not respect an arbitrary border line drawn by politicians in Yangoon or Bangkok and all on the ground all observers agree that the border is porous and that large numbers of workers, traders, and smugglers cross it at will. This makes it in everybodys interest to support the work of NGOs and especially MSF who work on these margins.

Sterling work KNC and MSF are doing. It’s never enough of course given the limited resources.

It’s not just high profile maladies such as HIV AIDS and TB, infectious diseases still dominate Burma’s health problems closely intertwined with malnutrition and poor sanitation. Poor health education compounds the issue, and increasingly commercialized medicine which increasing numbers of medical graduates gravitate to (for want of a proper state provision for an adequately funded health system with good support and proper remuneration for doctors) in the brave new open market system falls foul of most ordinary folk who can ill afford any kind of health care let alone specialist health care.

Medical ethics has been defeated by commercialism and self preservation/self interest . The devil, or rather the grim reaper, takes the hindmost i.e. the poor. Don’t you dare fall ill in the ‘new Myanmar’.

There are more incidence of hemi-pareses 2º to Stroke (CVA) then incidence of HIV.

The former 2º to hypertension, innocent victims of poverty/salty traditional diet while the latter especially women and children, the innocent victims of philandering spouses. All 2º to lack of education and poverty.

The 5 years mortality/morbidity of CVA in Myanmar is as unglamorous as HIV infected if not worst.

MSF and DASSK insistent on HIV as the face of Myanmar deficiency in healthcare reveal how both ignore the common factors of the lack of education and abject poverty which the latter party help to bring about so willingly while denying the obvious repeatedly.

I guess the reasons TB and HIV enjoy the high profile that they do are probably:

a. being infections that respond to specific therapy, so it’s pretty straightforward, and

b. contagious with the attendant risk of spreading to the developed world especially drug resistant TB. Antimalarials and yellow fever vaccine were developed in order to protect their own troops always fighting foreign wars throughout history. Looking out for number happens to be a time honoured principle.

Like the missionaries in the olden days, Western NGOs are perhaps the ‘great white saviours’ of postmodern times, at least some of them, in their ‘missionary zeal’ as well as in their patronising attitude and meddling that may or may not be closely linked to their donor states. It’s a difficult balancing act on the part of the recipient states of such aid. The IMF is the financial and hence a fundamentally more dictatorial and deadlier body than these INGOs. The old caveat ‘buyer beware’ definitely applies in both arenas.

Can beggars be choosers though since we are not exactly buyers albeit definitely debtors? I can still remember the sense of both great sympathy for and shame on behalf of the locals felt in Burma during the Biafran war and famine crisis witnessed in the news that went round the globe.

The Humanity within Myanmar has been raped twice, by the respective similar periods of dictatorships.

Both times with the full complicity of the West:

1) Letting Ne Win be Ne Win

2) Instituting the outrageously, unprecedented and unjustifiable sanction. A continuation of Ne Win policy, still insolently ongoing under the flimsiest guise of “progress in democratic changes” as touted by DASSK.

Demanding to give Myanmar it “Fair share of basic humanity need”,in heath care, education and economic well being make the Citizenry within neither beggars nor debtors to the irresponsible West.

You seem to be having it both ways: evil triumphs when good men do nothing (Ne Win era) , and ditto when they do something (SLORC/SPDC era). Assuming as you do that is that the West must not be other than a neutral agent of good. In God We Trust?

Progress with no political direction is fanciful. So is demanding that can only produce results from a position of strength. Besides a technological fix will not deliver on its own.

Neither a borrower nor a lender be. Credit greases the wheels of industry, trade and commerce, and delivers the social benefits such as health, education and transport infrastructure thereof provided they truly are the priorities of a govt. Why do you think so many countries are in hock and beholden to the IMF? Far from being irresponsible, its every move is calculated. Whether it’s really beneficial or detrimental to those on the receiving end is quite another story. But then again the survival of the prevailing socioeconomic order and the ruling class as its principle aim is not the same as the greater good of the country.

Tsk tsk–So soon abandoning the true concept of ‘power to the people, in education, health care and economic well being’ for the minutia of archaic socialist takes ?

Ko Moe Aung

As an ardent follower of KISS principles, providing instead of depriving the most basic necessity of a Citizenry is a MUST, that will in turn enable the myriad of possibilities that are UNIQUE to Myanmar and only Myanmar.

Yet to see the days when the shenanigan of IMF, so called self interest of West economic hegemony etc in play with this military government.